Good Morning

I drink my tea at the temperature I want, at the time I choose, in a mug nobody selected for me. This is what freedom tastes like. PG Tips and silence.

Before the kids are up. Before the emails start. Before the world remembers I exist and starts making demands. There’s a window. Maybe fifteen minutes. Where the house is still and the tea is hot and the only sound is the dog breathing and the boiler clicking and the fridge humming the way fridges do when nobody’s watching.

I didn’t have this before. Not the tea. I had tea before. Everybody has tea. But not the silence around it. Not the absence of monitoring. Not the freedom to sit in a kitchen chair at 6:30am without someone asking why I was up or what I was doing or whether I’d started the lunches yet.

The lunches can wait.

That sentence. Right there. That’s the revolution. The lunches can wait. Not forever. Not all day. Just long enough for me to drink this tea and exist in this body in this kitchen in this house without performing or adjusting or calculating the mood of someone who isn’t here any more.

He used to be up before me. Always. Like a sentry. The house was his before I’d even opened my eyes. The temperature set. The agenda established. The day’s mood already determined by whatever he’d decided while I slept.

Now I decide.

I decide the temperature. I decide the mug. I decide whether to sit by the window or at the table. I decide whether to look at my phone or stare at nothing. I decide whether to think about the business or the kids or the future or nothing at all.

Nothing at all is my favourite. The thinking about nothing. The existing without purpose. The radical, extraordinary luxury of a woman sitting in a chair with a cup of tea who is not performing and not planning and not managing and not surviving.

Just sitting. Just drinking. Just being.

PG Tips. The red box. Three sugars because I like three sugars and nobody is counting.

Good morning.

To me. From me. Every day. The first kind words I hear.

Good morning.